st: Finding Stata commands

[Tim <lists@timbp.com>]

> Given this comedy of errors on a fairly straightforward topic such as IV, I cringe at the thought of what they may have done to topics like propensity score matching, regression discontinuity, etc.  On p.168 they indicate that "the propensity score matching technique is implemented by an .ado file called pscore.ado." They fail to indicate that this is a user-written command (published a long time ago in the Stata Journal), nor do they recognize that most users these days would look for -psmatch2- of Leuven and Sianesi. The -pscore- command has not been updated since 2005.
Is there any help anywhere about how to find Stata commands and user 
written packages?

I have never used propensity score matching but I considered it recently 
and did some reading in the area, and this post attracted my attention. 
I have not been following this discussion, but I happened to notice the 
claim that "most users these days would look for -psmatch2-".

So my question: why would most users look for -psmatch2-?
Why would anyone look for that name if they did not already know it?

I typed -findit propensity score- and got a lot of results that look 
useful. The first few mention -gpscore- (I have not followed links to 
know if this is relevant) and  -pscore- is mentioned near the end.

In scanning the search results I saw no mention of -psmatch2-. Yet "most 
users...would look for psmatch2".

When I think about it, I realise all the Stata commands I use are those 
that were mentioned in my training.
If I seriously wanted to do propensity score matching in Stata, how 
would I find the correct command?
(and how do I know that -psmatch2- is the correct command?)
More generally, how do I find the best command for an analysis I am 
considering but have never used?


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